I’ll give a shoutout to the rEFInd boot manager. If anyone has ever had trouble with Grub, rEFInd continues to work for years across multiple machines. I have never had a problem with it.

It is an HP Omnibook 7, model 16T-BH000. Mine is 16", but it also comes in a 14" model called 14T-HG000 with the same 300 series processors if that is your preferred size.

It has an aluminum chassis, and I got mine configured with a 120Hz OLED screen. 70Wh battery on the 16" and 68Wh on the 14", though a 3% difference in battery is probably not enough to be noticeable. The 14" weighs around 1.44kg/3.17 lbs while the 16" weighs 1.96kg/4.32 lbs. I think that is actually a smidge lighter than the Macbooks, but not as light as something like the LG gram or the Asus Expertbook series, though I can’t speak for either of those as I have never owned them.

HP runs sales on their website frequently, so while my configuration normally would have cost around $2200 USD, I got it on sale for around $1600.

Edit: though I guess per your criteria above, yes, it does come with Windows installed and I ended up putting in a second SSD and installing Linux on that. Buying my own SSD was cheaper than upgrading to a 2TB option on their website, and it has two NVMe slots, so now I can dual boot as well. Also bear in mind that in a Macbook, the SSD is soldered to the motherboard and non-removable.

I am a little confused by the reasoning here. Is battery life your only consideration at all? Are there any other criteria which influence your choice?

It seems like a shame to jump ship on an entire ecosystem solely because your current machine has disappointing battery life.

I recently got a machine with the new Intel 358H and the B390 iGPU. I haven’t used it a ton yet, but it seems like it gets around 8-10 hours battery life on normal web browsing/productivity tasks in my experience, and while not as powerful as an RTX 4060 (Most benchmarks place the B390 somewhere between a 3050 and 4050), I imagine would be serviceable for editing and coding.

KDE. I don’t even do much to customize it. I think it looks pretty good out of the box.

That is fair enough. Have there been any findings that CPUs are sending telemetry of some kind, or is it more the idea of there possibly being some back door for governments to use?

I guess for me personally, my threat model for privacy is more towards foiling corporate data harvesting wherever possible, but I have resigned myself to the realization that making a computer nation-state-proof is borderline impossible without unreasonable levels of effort, especially for a normal computer user like myself.

That was my first thought about the IME, but I wasn’t sure. I guess that is what I am trying to understand.

Your best bet is to probably look into a snapdragon laptop. Based on everything I have heard, RISC V is going to be rough going. Some folks have also converted raspberry pis into laptops, but I imagine the build quality will be much more janky than an OEM laptop.

Also, depending on your philosophic outlook, would buying a used laptop count? You are not really supporting the CPU maker or laptop OEM, as you are using hardware which was already sold, and reducing e-waste in the world.

Lastly, I am trying to understand the meaning behind “protect my privacy.” Is there something less private about an AMD or Intel CPU, even if you have Linux installed on it, or is that covered by the Linux part?

As someone out of the loop on this, it would be helpful if they didn’t wait until 4 paragraphs into the article to state what OnlyOffice actually did. Likewise the article they link to by OpenOffice doesn’t state what EuroOffice did until 7 paragraphs in.

Apparently it’s a dispute about EuroOffice changing the logo when they forked OnlyOffice?

I think you would need to provide more detail to know what you have. Does it have a model number on it anywhere?